During medical emergencies, the need to aid a patient's breathing often becomes necessary. Tracheal intubation with an oral airway (oral tracheal airway) for ventilation of a patient's lungs is an operation of critical importance. An incorrect intubation, in which the airway is inserted into the esophagus instead of the trachea, could result in anoxia, brain damage, and death as air fails to reach the lungs. The patient's lungs are completely cut off from oxygen if the airway is wrongly inserted.
In addition to correct intubation, instruments are required by which means for ventilating the patient may be inserted in the trachea as quickly as possible. This requirement is particularly necessary for emergency intubations, which occur for example after accidents in which the trachea and, as a consequence, the respiration of the patient is strongly restricted or entirely blocked. Emergency situations of that kind occur in connection with work accidents, road accidents and particularly motor cycle accidents. For such an emergency intubation, an instrument needs to be provided which is preferably operable in a simple and reliable fashion.
Conventional laryngoscopes include a handle that carries batteries or another similar power source. Attached to the handle is a blade portion that may include a light source. The medical professional will position the blade portion of the laryngoscope in the oropharynx of a patient in an attempt to gain access to the patient's airway. During this step, the light source in the blade portion will illuminate and give the medical professional an improved view of the patient's airway. However, with conventional laryngoscopes and intubation instruments, visualization of the larynx is often inadequate or even impossible as a patient's anatomical conditions or characteristics make laryngoscopy difficult.
Some intubation endoscopes have been developed to provide increased visualization of an airway passage during the procedure. In some embodiments, the intubation endoscope comprises a flexible tube having an image sensor mounted at its distal end. The intubation endoscope is used in conjunction with a conventional laryngoscope such that an airway passage is visualized during the intubation process by utilizing the laryngoscope to open the airway passage and to simultaneously insert in the airway the intubation endoscope to provide imaging of the region of interest. Such an intubation endoscope is known from U.S. Pat. No. 6,319,195.
However, conventional intubation instruments still fail to provide simple and reliable operation, especially with respect to visualization during an intubation procedure. Conventional intubation instruments also do not provide real-time documentation of the intubation procedure and the region of interest (e.g., pharynx, larynx, trachea, etc.). Real-time documentation may be necessary for quality assurance/improvement and educational purposes. For example, video data may be useful in identifying unsafe intubation steps and accident precursors and/or evaluating performance of the medical practitioner.
Conventional intubation instruments, such as intubation endoscopes, often have multiple control interfaces (e.g., buttons, knobs, joysticks, levers, switches) for controlling different functions/features of the instrument. However, with multiple control interfaces, a user may engage the wrong control interface (e.g., press the wrong button) because they are looking at a screen displaying the region of interest rather than at the control interfaces on the instrument. The wrong button press would invoke a function or move which would then have to be undone, thereby increasing the overall time for intubating a patient. Further, the control interfaces themselves do not provide an intuitive way for a user to determine the status of a function/feature associated with a particular control interface. For example, even if a user looked down at the intubation instrument to find the desired control interface to manipulate, the user may still have to refocus on the screen or another component of the intubation system in order to ascertain the current status or configuration of the function/feature before engaging the control interface. As a result, conventional instruments do not facilitate correct and expeditious intubation.
Thus, there exists a need in the art for an improved intubation instrument and improved control interface(s) for an intubation instrument.